Three years from the sun

Sour Water

Slowly, the sea smallens. You learn to live with how
you love. If a river can course this, you can too.
From Ulrichen snow to Cahuilla sand, a journey
you never knew would take such time to know you.

It might well have become a harsh glaciation of sour water
were it not for the kisses that buttered the warm gipfeli
with morning sun and her gracing mouth. A winter road
through The Goms brought houses built on collared stones

that crowded the iceway’s edge and kept rooting longtails
from finding their way into the larder of your loving fires.
And the moving unribboned behind you like a spool raveling
in reverse until you’re motoring Temecula past midnight

and the low moon tilts westward in a black sombrero,
somewhere out over some place you cannot see from
here but know exists, driven in sway and drift amid
the scattered shallows of all your vacant imaginings.

The crying comes not so much as before as if some polished
spigot served its purpose for once, alone on your way home,
with not one song lacerating the sac of your dear sorrow or
blurring the stars causing them to run via lactea down

the desert of your saltless face. This is the drying sea you
once thought fathomless, rifted to the very core of the earth
with the wound of love let go, of love let loose for a sudden
season before the world tilted three years away from the sun.

You are an island tonight. All the blue worry of misread
soundings that circled the current of all you’ve endured
has brought you here to chartlessness and tranquil anchorage.
She has left you ripened plantains in a bowl. A note set in her

own hand reads: Gone another ocean away. Won’t be home.
Wait up late if you wish. So you do, for nothing, for the practice
of waiting up for no one. Into these hours swell the brackish
smalling of the sea. You learn to live with how you love.

Joseph Gallo
July 9, 2006